SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
5.2 Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thought
While Freudian psychoanalysis always had its faithful adherents, the dominating influence of dissenting schools such as ego psychology was undeniable. So much so that calls for a 'return to Freud' could be heard little more than a decade after his death. Section 5.3 examines the most consequential return to Freud initiated by Lacan beginning in the early 1950s. The current section begins with Ricoeur's own popularizing return to Freud's original texts and subsequently turns to Frank and Kristeva, who take into account Lacan when critically assessing Freud. These latter two discussions might therefore be read most productively in conjunction with the following section dealing with Lacan and his strict adherents.
As was mentioned in Section 1.3 above, Ricoeur's work in the 1960s took a defensive posture against structuralism and psychoanalysis in the name of hermeneutics, and his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (1965)478 is no exception. So one should not expect to find here a correction to Jung, Kris and all others who feel the particular hermeneutical levels of psychoanalysis are its key contributions to the human sciences. But the massive work that is Freud and Philosophy with its close reading of texts spanning Freud's entire career does not warrant an offhand dismissal of Ricoeur. His project, appropriately categorized at this time as hermeneutical phenomenological, has noteworthy nuances readily understandable given the path forged in the chapters above. The first and last parts of this book expressly articulate his project which, generally speaking, attempts to submit psychoanalysis to philosophy to deepen its hermeneutical approach, whereas its middle part forms an analytic on Freud's texts. From the very first chapter Ricoeur invokes The Interpretation of Dreams to champion the 'double-meaning' of the symbol – not the signifier – as that which requires interpretation in a linguistic expression. For Ricoeur psychoanalysis is narrower than the area of symbols, what he calls the 'hermeneutic field.'479 These symbols provide an impetus for a search for hidden meaning and what brings to light the double meanings of these symbols themselves is psychoanalytic interpretation, which takes place in symbolic and reflective thought. But is the double meaning thus shown a revelation of the sacred or a dissimulation of what desire means? This question forms the horizon or the two poles of Ricoeur's hermeneutical project. Believing in the former is to consider meaning as that which is addressed as a message or kerygma. Such interpretation as a recollection or restoration of meaning holds the hermeneutical circle as its maxim while engaging in a process of demythologization. This is to be contrasted with Freud, Nietzsche and Marx who view interpretation as an exercise of suspicion, reject the primacy of the sacred object and generally seek to reduce illusion. This type of interpretation does not aim for a consciousness of meaning but rather calls for the demystification of false consciousness through the deciphering of expressions originally ciphered by an unconscious work. Ricoeur contends that neither interpretive disposition can stand alone; rather, a proper hermeneutical philosophy such as his begins by 'placing the hermeneutic problem within the movement of reflection.'480 The idea is that the conflict between these two poles can be grounded in a concrete reflection whereby one recognizes oneself in the work of expressed signs.
Having thus defined his project, Ricoeur proceeds in the second part of his book in a trajectory starting from what he feels are Freud's abstract and solipsistic earlier writings to the more concrete and intersubjective writings of his later period. This trajectory is placed within what Ricoeur calls the general tension of Freudian epistemology, a tension which makes 'Freud's writings present themselves as a mixed or even ambiguous discourse, which at times states conflicts of force subject to an energetics, at times relations of meaning subject to a hermeneutics;' yet despite his hope 'to overcome the gap between the two orders of discourse and to reach the point where one sees that the energetics implies a hermeneutics and the hermeneutics discloses an energetics,'481 it is clear from the summary of his findings nearly two hundred pages later how the hermeneutical reading of Freud wins out. As he writes, 'we showed that the insight proper to psychoanalysis lies elsewhere, in the reciprocity between interpretation and explanation, between hermeneutics and the economics; but at the same time we had to recognize that the speculation based on the quantitative hypothesis is not in complete harmony with the actual nature of analytic discourse.'482 So despite recognizing a structural component to Freud's work, a scientific model whose actual mechanistic movement is entirely meaningless, at every turn its importance is downplayed. For psychoanalytic interpretation should most properly be considered in its hermeneutical capacities.
The third part of his book can thus be seen as Ricoeur's attempt to expunge once and for all the scientific aspirations embedded in the more structural aspects of psychoanalysis. First he considers whether psychology or phenomenology can reformulate psychoanalysis, but deems them as not addressing the true issue. Psychology after all claims its own scientificity. Rather, psychoanalytic discourse is to be seen as governed by a 'semantics of desire' which defines psychoanalysis as 'an exegetical science dealing with the relationships of meaning between substitute objects and the primordial (and lost) instinctual objects.'483 What is certainly useful is Freud's own often used metaphor of archeology, which evokes the idea of digging down to fundamental levels of the psyche. Ricoeur leverages this notion to give the sense that at stake here is an unearthing of the deep and unconscious meaning behind the apparent meanings of a false consciousness. Provided, of course, that it is specifically modified and appropriated to produce an 'archeology of the subject.' This would move us significantly toward the aforementioned notion of the concrete reflection needed to resolve the hermeneutical problematic. However, Ricoeur feels that this notion of archeology is inadequate. For it must be coupled with a teleological model of consciousness – one which is lacking in Freud's texts. Turning instead to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to develop this notion, Ricoeur's idea is that teleology provides an important counterforce to the regressive direction of archeological interpretation by its progressive interpretative vector. These two, as dialectically related, lead 'reflection that understands its archeology to a symbolic understanding that would grasp the indivisible unity of its archeology and its teleology in the very origin of speech. The dialectic is not everything; it is only a procedure that reflection uses in order to overcome its abstraction and make itself concrete or complete.'484 In this way Ricoeur proposes a general hermeneutics which would encompass the tension of the two interpretive poles, placing them within a concept of the symbol. Yet this symbol is predominantly one of faith which calls for a hermeneutics to try to grasp its possible call or kerygma. Quite revealing of his final position, Ricoeur considers the imprints of meaning left by Freudian conceptions of instincts and fantasies only to set these aside in its final pages to instead 'consider speech or the spoken word [la parole], for this is the element in which the advancement of meaning occurs.'485 The following call is thus made in terms which evoke Heidegger, Bultmann and Ebeling (the former two having been explicitly discussed by Ricoeur himself): to supplement Freud's hermeneutics of suspicion with one that carries with it a mytho-poetic function and whose symbolic exploration of our relation to beings and to Being demands that we listen. Ricoeur's recognition of the meaningless structural aspects of psychoanalysis thus only serves in the end to champion the hermeneutical aspects of Freud. And it goes without saying that the further nonsensical domain which Freud opens up is not even a possibility for Ricoeur.
Before turning to Section 5.3 to demonstrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis can also be read according to the same three levels as with Freud (viz., with respect to its hermeneutical or structural aspects or to the nonsensical object), it is worthwhile to explore the choices made by Frank and Kristeva when reading Freud and Lacan. For his part Frank recognizes all three levels in his essay “The 'true subject' and its double: Jacques Lacan's hermeneutics” (1978).486 Broadly speaking, this text offers up a defense of Lacan against both hermeneutical phenomenology and (post)structuralism. Discussing Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Ricoeur and Sartre throughout, Frank provides us with '[t]he reason why I place such emphasis on this characteristic of existentialist-ontological hermeneutics... [viz.,] that, at least at first sight, it shows undeniable similarities to Lacan's psychoanalytical approach.'487 He goes on to outline these similarities and the general indebtedness of Lacan to hermeneutics to which Derrida's critique of the former's own structuralism is argued to have overlooked. That is to say, Lacan effectively dodges the full brunt of Derrida's accusation, that his particular brand of structuralism is a reversion to a logo-phonocentrism, by relying on a hermeneutical approach which dissolves the reflexive self-certainty of a Cartesian cogito. So according to Frank this combination of hermeneutics and structuralism places Lacan at an advantage over Derrida. But the reverse is equally true. The structuralist component of Lacan allows him to depart from the flawed 'hermeneutics of the "merging of horizons"' of Gadamer.488 Lacan is thus seen to enjoy the best of both worlds with little of the failures of either field. In terms of subjectivity the 'true subject' is not conceived as hermeneutical or structuralist; it is not the meaning-laden hermeneutical phenomenologist or the 'beyond of communication: it is by withdrawing itself from the linguistic happening that it invests the material signifiers with the meaning that is exchanged.'489 Connections between subjectivity and meaning are further explored below but for now it should be recognized that Frank clearly identifies the third level of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. He writes: '"Interpretation is not open to all meanings." It isolates, as Freud says, a core of non-meaning, without wishing to free it from ambiguity.'490 Unfortunately these words are written parenthetically, and thus this passing insight gives way to a double concern for the lack of adequate foundation to Lacan's theory of the subject as well as the more general failure of (post)structuralism to account for the phenomena of meaning and consciousness on the sole basis of the relationship between signifiers. To address these concerns, Frank feels the need to reach back to Schleiermacher and Humboldt and argue that Lacan's hermeneutics is effectively Romantic. He concludes by suggesting that today's (post-Heideggerian) hermeneutics and ((post)structuralist) theories of discourse should be reminded of the Lacanian-Romantic hermeneutical lessons regarding meaning.491 So while Frank does Ricoeur one better in the identification of an additional level from which to read psychoanalytic texts, their conclusions nevertheless settle on the same hermeneutical plane.
In contrast Kristeva considers how psychoanalysis disrupts this hermeneutical plane of meaning in her essay “Psychoanalysis and the Polis” (1982).492 Discernible throughout the essay are attempts to identify this disruptive force yet since she eschews any notion of objectivity, the results are rather mixed. Certainly starting from the Nietzschean-Foucauldian notion that conferring meaning upon an object presupposes a particular perspective, for Kristeva the question now becomes exactly how that object is identified. If she can show that such objects are delusions, then our desire to give them meaning is undercut. So on the one hand stands the subject's 'desire to give meaning... rooted in the speaking subject's need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object.'493 This she identifies as a quintessential political desire whose apogee is the obsessive quest for the ultimate Meaning and whose most consequential representative is said to be Heidegger. On the other hand the '[b]reaking out of the enclosure of the presentness of meaning' is accomplished by the Freudian interpreter who no longer interprets so much as '"associates," because there is no longer an object to interpret; there is, instead, the setting off of semantic, logical, phantasmatic and indeterminable sequences.'494 Although refraining from structuralist language in this essay, we can surmise that the potentially interminable signifying associative chain is the decisive mechanism in tipping the literary text-object 'toward the unknown of the interpretive theory,' as she writes a page earlier. But whatever the case, Kristeva's point is that there is something that removes the ability to confer meaning upon an object as that object always defers itself to ever new objects. One clinical practice she clearly identifies as frustrating and dissolving stable meanings is the suspension of interpretation effected by the silence of the analyst; this simple technique results in a demonstration of how 'meaninglessness exists' or alternatively, how there is meaning but one only known to the extent that it escapes the subject.495 On the following page Kristeva refers to Freud's notion that there is an 'umbilical' [navel] to every dream and to every interpretation, which she describes as that 'unnameable' enclosed in every enigmatic object. Above this was identified as the sublime object which indexes the subversive third level of the Freudian field. But while Kristeva does recognize it as a condition of interpretation, she resists conceiving this unnameable as a singular point disclosed among interpretable objects to instead dismiss it as the 'primordial phantasm' of a return to the original archaic mother. Attempts to give it meaning merely grant the subject a fleeting phallic jouissance. Yet this is no small matter, for attending this matrix is what she calls on the last page a 'totalitarian Meaning,' which should threaten us as much, possibly, as the monstrous Thing threatens Lyotard. But by also failing to identify a singular suspension point to meaning, her mistrust of meaning can only be communicated by speaking of its incompleteness and in this essay declarations of its further heterogeneity and non-Totality abound. As seen in Section 4.2 above, such a state of meaning can only come from embracing, as she does and in true Rancièrean style, a dispersive interpretive logic out of which an infinity of meaning grows. Indeed she seems to have purposively constructed her essay to reflect the chaos of free association in psychoanalytic interpretation.496 With Kristeva we thus find an explicit recognition and demonstration of how any strict hermeneutical reading of psychoanalysis is disrupted by its actual practice. In contrast to Ricoeur and Frank this is accomplished by putting into play the most subversive object psychoanalysis has to offer. Yet this object remains here only implicitly articulated in its notion.
Book based on this dissertation
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